mercredi 7 octobre 2009

Ferrari’s front-engined super speedster, Ferrari 599, gets a Chinese makeover by contemporary Chinese artist, Lu Hao. Lu Hao is know for creating meticulously painted realistic paintings that come off as photographs at the first glance. His subjects depicted organized displays of everyday items as seen in China such as wall display of socks on sale, shelves of books and so forth. For his work with Ferrari, other than the fire-engine red Ferrari 599 with a new ignition button carved out of jade and inscribed with ancient Chinese script of Xiao Zhuan of “Engine Start”, and rev counter with numerals done up in Chinese characters, there is a special one-off Ferrari 599 hand-painted in style of cracked porcelain by Lu Hao himself.

Also known as Ru ware, cracked porcelain is one of the rarest major porcelain in Chinese ceramic wares. First created for the Chinese Imperial Court back in AD 1086 - 1127, there were only known to be approximately forty surviving pieces up till recently. However, don’t let the Ferrari’s delicate cracked appearance fool you– the model still features the Enzo derived 611bhp, 6.0L V-12 engine that speeds from 0-60 in just 3.7s.

Unfortunately, this is a one-off piece that will be auctioned off at a charity gala auction this month. You might have a better chance of trying to secure one of the dozen samples of the red China Edition Ferrari 599– not that this would be an easy feat either! Check out the pictures and behind the scenes video as this is probably as far as most of us are going to get to the ride.